Outspoken and dazzlingly glam, but oh so down to earth, Rita Ora is Marie Claire’s October cover star...
Outspoken and dazzlingly glam, but oh so down to earth, Rita Ora is Marie Claire’s October cover star.
Plucked from obscurity (ok, Boots the chemist) to join Jay Z’s Roc Nation in 2009, she’s never looked back, and has been topping the charts and ruling our telly boxes ever since.
And the X Factor judge is not afraid to admit that she’s a star permanently on the rise. In fact, she says, everything is going totally to plan. ‘Oh, it is in full effect. We're these conniving Kosovan hungry bitches,’ she says of herself and her sister, who is also her manager. ‘I knew that one way or another, I was going to do things my way.’
‘I would rip my T-shirts and be really punk and not clean,’ she says of her rebellious teenage style. ‘And I would have blonde hair, really dark eyebrows, red lipstick, lots of fake rings that made my fingers go green.’
Rita also speaks openly to Marie Claire about relationships in our new issue. ‘I'm afraid of being alone,’ she admits. ‘Sometimes love just makes you feel crazy. And that feeling that we have as girls, just to have that feeling, even for five seconds, it's like crack. I mean, don't compare it to that, but you know what I mean.’
On her break up with Calvin Harris last year, which was the subject of much tabloid fascination, she says; ‘There was a reason why I split up with him. [...] It was more of a thing where I was in awe. I was at that point in my relationship where I felt he could do no wrong. I thought he had my back and that he'd never steer me wrong. But then "I Will Never Let You Down" came out, and everything started to go a bit weird. I don't know if it was because business was mixed with personal or what.’
Read our full interview with Rita Ora in the new issue of Marie Claire UK, out now.